Like his fifth book, An Infinity of Mirrors, Mile High is a consciously ambitious work, primarily concerned with the establishment of Prohibition in the United States, and Condon researched it thoroughly.

Curiously enough, it was published within a few months of a somewhat similar novel about multi-generational New York gangsters, The Godfather, by a relatively unknown author, Mario Puzo.

What grips his imagination, and shakes it till splendid words fall out, is the tic of a human bomb.... Mile High at first seems a normal Condon fancy.... Eddie West, the son of an Irish immigrant, brings about Prohibition singlehanded.

If Minnesota's lakes are the hoof-prints of Bunyan's blue ox, why can't Warren Harding, Al Capone and Joseph McCarthy be the droppings from Eddie West's cigar?

For the first time in eight novels, he wavers from his delightful obsession that maniacal rigidity is civilization's main motivating force and therefore the only human quirk worth a novelist's attention.... Eddie West dies of Condon's sermonizing.

The last half of the book develops a subplot involving West's compulsion to murder Negro women (his mother, who deserted him, was a very dark-skinned Sicilian).

For some years now, Richard Condon... has been one of our supreme entertainers, a verbal tap-dancer whose ambitions usually have been limited to bedazzlement, fantasy and dark laughter.

Eddie West walks corridors with Warren Harding; he meets frequently with Paul Kelly, one of the actual bosses of the early Mafia; he talks with Al Capone and Johnnie Torrio.

The novel offers many fine examples of the traits and stylistic tricks that were typical of all of Condon's works, among them, as the playwright George Axelrod once put it, "the sheer gusto of the prose, the madness of his similies, the lunacy of his metaphors".

[4] A selection, taken almost at random: from Mile High: As one Condon book succeeded another, he more and more described elaborate food preparations, generally from French cuisine, and gave long, detailed menus for what his characters ate at various meals.

In spite of Condon's thorough research and mania for elaborate details, long lists of trivia, and the apparent authenticity of all the purported facts that are cited in his books, there are at least two probable errors in Mile High.

This is possible but most unlikely: rayon had been invented 50 years earlier but its development was troubled and it was not until after World War I that it had been refined enough to become an everyday article of clothing.

A more glaring error is the statement on page 41 that Eddie West receives an autographed photograph from William McKinley in the White House dated January 27, 1904.